


Saint and Dragon

by SilverDagger



Category: Claymore
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Family, Friendship, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 10:10:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2265801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miria's revelation following the fight with Agatha throws Yuma's past into  a different light. Helen is determined to give her a new perspective on the present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saint and Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully, this is ignored on its own merit, and not thanks to AO3's amazing disappearing fic trick. ;)

When Yuma is young, she spends a lot of time being afraid of everything - imagining the snakes that might be crawling through cracks in the garden walls, the feral dogs in alleyways, wondering how far down that well goes and what would happen to her if she tripped and fell to the bottom. She keeps away from heights and edges, and water where her feet don't touch the ground. She dreams bad dreams. And then one day she comes back from the family bakery, still wearing white flour up to her elbows, and there's a spreading pool of red beneath the door, and the worst of all her fears is made abruptly true.

She thinks about that day a lot, after the Organization takes her in. She doesn't need the sleep she used to, which means that even when they keep her training late, past the hour when the sun has set and her yoma eyes have to pick out the faintest traces of torchlight and moonlight, she still has a lot of time to think after lessons are over, and not stop thinking, no matter how hard she tries.

She learns the rules - she's good at rules, she likes knowing exactly what she needs to be doing - and she learns how to live in her new body without running too fast or breaking things by accident or hurting someone she doesn't mean to hurt. She picks things up quickly, but it still takes time for it to register that the most dangerous things around here aren't the snakes or the scorpions or even the men in black, who are a little bit of both, but Yuma and her fellow trainees and the older warriors. She's not sure how to feel about it when it finally does. Monsters don't have to be afraid of monsters, do they? But she still doesn't like heights or sudden noises, or dark empty rooms with shadows and cobwebs in the corners, and as her first days stretch into a month, then two, she realizes that despite her best efforts, instead of just being afraid of everything, she's afraid of everything and herself.

*

She thinks about it after, too - years later in a rubble-strewn street in Rabona with the smell of death still hanging in the air, her ears ringing from the noise of battle and the sudden silence of its aftermath. There are soldiers staring at her like she's something out of a myth, which isn't new, but this time like it's the saint that they're seeing, and not the dragon. She's never fancied herself much of either - she's too weak, too soft to be anyone's nightmare or savior - but the leather-bound grip of the sword in her hand, the dark blood staining her arms, speak differently.

 _Within the Organization_ , Miria is saying. The yoma are created within the Organization. Yuma hears those words, and all others retreat to insignificance. Not because a wider world isn't revelation enough, and an entire island kept ignorant of it, but because there's a moment when Miria falters, and Yuma hears what she isn't saying too.

She says nothing of it. Miria must have a reason, like she did in Pieta - she knows better than Yuma what secrets must be kept and why. But by the time she and Galatea have hammered out their contract with the city, sanctuary traded for allegiance and defense, it's weighing her down heavily. Maybe that's why Miria keeps all those secrets close. Knowing the truth of them, or even just suspecting, changes too much and too little all at the same time.

When the negotiations are over, Yuma doesn't head back to the inn with the others, but tarries on the cathedral grounds, looking for something but not entirely certain what. Not prayer, though, not forgiveness. It's not her god this place was built to honor, and the snarling chimeras and painted angels with swords of flame remind her as well as anything that she doesn't belong. 

It's a strange feeling, though, wandering alone in a city that used to hate her and maybe doesn't any longer. Those walls are meant to keep demons out and they just let her walk right on in, and when the priests see her they avert their eyes, mutter words of exorcism, but none of them stop her from going where she wants to go.

They couldn't, she realizes. She could do whatever she wanted, and they couldn't stop her. If what she wanted was to rip the tapestries from the walls, put her fist through stained glass windows and smash the communion wine against the altar, she could. 

She doesn't want that, though. What she wants is to find someplace where there isn't anyone else around, or at least nobody loud or prone to staring.

She says as much to the priest named Vincent, when he intercepts her in some great, vaulted chamber, and he points her to the meditation garden, enclosed by high walls but open to the air and bound to be empty, this time of night.

And so it is - empty, lit only by the sliver moon shining overhead and her own night vision - and so she finds herself walking along well-tended paths, past statues of saints with incense and votive candles burning at their feet, until she finds a place beside a fountain where she can sit and rest. It's quiet there. The trees are blossoming, slender branches trailing white starlike flowers of a kind she's never seen before. A sweet breeze blows from the east, washing away the lingering scent of blood and the memory of carnage in the streets below. It's the first time she's had a chance to be alone with her thoughts since she left the North, without somewhere to be going or something to kill, and it doesn't take long - in this tranquil place, surrounded by fragile, growing things - for the past to come running up behind her.

Made within the Organization. The yoma are -

She presses a hand to her forehead, trying not to think about it. But in her mind, she's seven years old again, reaching out to feel the cool metal of the door handle in her hand, forcing herself to turn it. She wants to run away. She ought to run away. But something won't let her go, because she knows what happened in there - she _knows_ what happened - and trying to escape now won't change anything that matters. So she pulls open the door to darkness, and when she does, the beast is there, crouched beside its meal and looking up at her with unholy eyes, teeth red and glinting. It's wearing her mother's clothes, and she's certain that up until she left that morning, it had been wearing her mother's face.

And in the meditation garden, cool water ripples beneath her fingers and there's birdsong somewhere, high and distant, and she isn't seven years old any longer, but she still hasn't stopped being frightened.

Yuma wonders what it was like for her, whether it came on gradually or all at once, humanity flickering and then gone like a candle snuffed out between one second and the next. She wonders when - if - she realized something was wrong.

 _She must have_ , Yuma thinks. She had seemed different at the end, those last days braiding up Yuma's hair, smoothing down her skirts and always telling her to run along, and not to bother her. Distracted. Yuma remembers being pushed out the door that morning, and the nervous tension deepening the lines of her mother's face, the traces of something hiding around the edges of her smile like weariness, or sadness, or pain.

 _Go and help your uncle_ , she had said, knowing Yuma would, that she wouldn't argue. Yuma thinks of her mother, and she turns a sheet of embossed black paper over and over in her fingers, and wonders what it will be like for her.

*

She's not sure how long she sits there before becoming aware that she isn't alone. She doesn't know whether she would have noticed earlier, had she not been lost in thought. But she lifts her head, suddenly watchful, and her hand is on the hilt of her sword before her mind catches up with her body and she remembers that she knows these people, and there is no danger here. Only two youki auras at the garden gate, familiar, safe.

Mostly safe. One of them is Helen, and Yuma's known from the time she was a trainee that it's hard to predict what she might do. Mischief only, these days, and no harm, but Yuma is in a poor mood for mischief tonight.

Deneve is there too. She lingers at the wall with crossed arms, but Helen marches over without preamble and stands looking down at Yuma like she's incomprehensible, a language Helen doesn't know how to read.

"Hey," she says, "hey, you still have that? Why the hell do you still have that?"

She's a little bit drunk still, or at least she smells like ale and smoke, sawdust, all those tavern smells Yuma never liked much. But her eyes are clear, and she looks at Yuma too directly for comfort, and Yuma realizes that she came here with the aim of finding her.

"You don't need it," Helen says. "Get rid of it. Throw it away."

Yuma shakes her head, stubborn without knowing why. It doesn't matter. It shouldn't matter. She should have left it behind her.

"Did you get rid of yours?" she asks.

"Sure did. Ditched it in Pieta along with everything else." Helen laughs a little, looking uncomfortable, and Yuma wonders if she's lying. Helen lies a lot, but she wears her emotions too openly to be any good at it. It's one of the few things the two of them have in common.

"No point to it, you know? If one of us... well, we look out for each other." She grabs your arm tightly. "We'll look out for you, you understand?"

Even after seven years, the unexpected contact feels awkward, and Yuma pulls away, shaking off the weight of Helen's hand on her skin. It's the first time anyone has touched her in... longer than she can remember, really, except to harm or to heal, and the first time in her memory that anyone has called her _one of us_.

"You put centipedes in my boots just yesterday," Yuma says.

"Yeah, and you screamed like a trainee. Miria thought someone was being murdered. That's not the point."

"So what is the point?" she asks.

"The point is, you don't need it."

"I -"

"You don't."

"I do," Yuma says quietly, and Helen makes an exasperated noise, just this side of angry but not - Yuma thinks - angry at her.

"What you need is to stop worrying so much," she says. And she pulls Yuma to her feet, gripping her by her wrists, stronger than Yuma but a little unsteady where she stands. Yuma still doesn't know why Deneve is here, except that anywhere Helen goes, she follows. But she shakes her head once and says, "She's right, you know. Quit chasing after trouble. It'll find you even if you don't."

Helen twists around to shoot her a disapproving look and yells, "don't _scare_ her, Deneve," and "anyway, you're one to talk," and Yuma wonders whether they've had this argument or one like it before. There's history there, anyway. Everything about those two is steeped in history, and it's hard not to feel like she's intruding. But Helen had called her one of us, and she isn't one to say what she doesn't mean.

"I'm not scared," Yuma says, "I just -"

"Yeah, I know," Deneve says, almost kindly this time. She steps closer, moving the way she always does with every step well-considered, no motion or energy wasted. "Hey, some of the Guard are having a victory celebration down in the practice yard, if you want to join us there."

And she does. She can imagine it - bonfires in the Cathedral square, food and drink and wild music, the fierce jubilation of soldiers who aren't dead yet - but the only thing she can think to say is, "You really think they really want Claymores around?"

"You think they can keep us out?" Helen says, at the same time as Deneve says, "yeah, we're invited."

Helen punches Yuma on the arm hard enough to hurt, and says, "come get drunk with us. Or, you know, hang around on the sidelines like some scaredy-cat kid. Up to you."

"Alright," Yuma says. Helen stares at her in genuine surprise, then grins wolfishly, a white flash of teeth and sudden, dangerous mirth. Yuma wonder what she's managed to get herself into now. 

"Seriously?" Helen says. "You're gonna get drunk? _You?_ "

And Yuma thinks about it, and to her own surprise, she finds yourself nodding.

"Sure," she says. "It couldn't hurt."

"I'll hold you to it, you know," Helen says. "No backing out."

She slings an arm around Yuma's shoulders, grabs Deneve by the elbow and drags the both of them along behind her, and Yuma could tell her to lay off, but she doesn't really want to.

"There's dancing," Helen says, "and knife-throwing. I bet you'd be damn good at that, the way you throw your claymore around. Oy, Deneve, you think we should put money on Yuma?"

"Only if I get half of it," Yuma says, and even if she feel her face heat immediately at the presumption, Helen crows with inebriated laughter, thumps her on the back and says "sounds like a deal."

Behind her back, Yuma can see Deneve smiling slightly - fond, almost indulgent - and she knows there will be no more talk of death or monsters tonight.

She slips the card back into a pouch at her belt, beside the old copper coins and mica-flecked stones and other small things she's collected over the years. It's there for a reason, whether Helen wants to admit it or not. It's there to keep her from wearing her mother's face. But she's not seven years old anymore, jumping at shadows and spiders, and for the first time in a very long time, she's not frightened.

She's not going to get rid of it. But that doesn't mean it can't be put aside for a while.


End file.
